Product Reviews

Ricoh's Aficio GX2500 business printer uses an innovative gel ink system that's intended to produce the colour output quality of an inkjet at speeds to rival a laser printer. Unfortunately, the result is like one of those jokes where the Italians organise, the Germans cook and the English run the airports. What they've actually achieved is laser print quality at inkjet running costs.

The GX2500 is larger than most inkjets, but works in a fairly similar way. Four cartridges slot into the front, delivering ink to nozzles in the print heads. The heads themselves are wider than usual, which allows more ink to be placed on the page in each pass. The most significant element in all this is Ricoh's Liquid Gel ink,

ADVERTISEMENT

a thick, durable pigment-based ink that dries quickly onto the page.

Our colour prints were indeed quick, and even areas of heavy tint came out almost dry. The pigment inks are accurately coloured, but don't seem to be as well suited to delicate shades as traditional dye-based inks. The gels aren't intended for photo printing; Ricoh doesn't even make photo paper for its GelSprinter range, and our tests on generic paper looked pale and washed out.

We didn't have to wait around for text, with ten pages taking just over a minute at normal quality. However, this looked mediocre, with fuzzy, poorly defined lettering. Small fonts in our mixed colour text and graphics documents were broken up and hard to read. High quality was more legible, but ten pages took two minutes and 38 seconds.

A bigger problem is the exorbitant running costs. A single page of mixed black and colour text costs 9.9p. At least you won't have to change cartridges too often: a standard black unit should last 1500 pages, and each of the colour cartridges 1000. However, the ink monitor indicated that the cartridges supplied with it were only half full.

Fast it may be, but Canon's PIXMA iP4500 can print almost as quickly, with far better quality and great-looking photos. And it's a lot cheaper to buy and run.